Artworks – Title Picture

TITLE PICTURE

20.04.2018

DESIGNING A PICTURE FOR THE FRONTPAGE

CHRISTIAN OTT

AUTHOR

Introduction

When I first started with the creation of my website, I wanted it to look great. Although I prefer simplistic, monochromatic designs, I can’t deny, that a good-looking, eye-catching title picture raises the frontpage of your site to another level. So, how could a title picture for my site look like? Certainly, it had to contain pictures of the two main elements: Cryptocurrencies and football. Additionally, it could contain a logo of my site as well as an avatar of myself.

Elements of the picture

Starting off, I made a list of elements that could fit in a title picture. For the football part, I wanted to use the logo I already created for my former site, which has the shape of a footballelixir. I also thought about including a stadium in the picture, which could surround either the footballelixir or all the elements contained in the site. For the cryptocurrencies part, I created a scheme of lines, which are ended by circles, which should represent a blockchain. In this scheme I included logos of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Skycoin. As the logo of the site, I chose a combination of my initials C and O and placed the O inside the C. In addition to the logo, I created an avatar of myself, which could also be used in the title picture. As a supplementary element I decided to include a floodlight, which would also match well with the stadium.

Position of the elements

So, I had the elements and knew in which direction I wanted to go but positioning them in the picture was challenging, since they had to look in sync with each other. I started with the positioning of the logo. The logo and the avatar would be placed best in the middle of the title picture. Both would be seen immediately by viewers and if the sides of the title picture would be cut in a mobile view, the logo and avatar would still be visible. I positioned the logo in the upper middle of the picture, while the avatar itself was placed inside a display below the logo.

Next up was the positioning of the symbols for the main topics of the site. Since there are just two main topics, each could be placed on one side of the picture. I decided to place the Footballelixir logo on the left side and the cryptocurrencies symbol on the right side. For the football part, I discarded the idea of a stadium that would surround the Footballelixir logo, since this idea contained way too many elements and would distract viewers from the important part, which is the Footballelixir logo. However, to make the logo look less loosely, I modified the view on it to be in a shape of a star.

Connecting the part of cryptocurrencies on the right side to the other elements, could be done by making it seem like it is under the surface, which refers to a blockchain being a database and therefore an underlying layer of applications. With a darker color for this part, the rendering of this optical illusion became possible. A smaller part above the cryptocurrencies on the right side was still open, which I filled with a floodlight. Take a look at the final result:

Wrap-up

The resulting title picture fits perfectly to the site. The logo can be seen immediately and with football and cryptocurrencies, it includes the main elements of my site. The color range is consistent and it is perfectly scalable, because the whole picture is a vector graphic. Personally, this picture has been the most advanced vector graphic I created from scratch this far, but the great looking end result motivated me to create more complex vector graphics and establish an own art section on the site.